Monthly Archives: May 2016

One of the biggest recent flubs from the Not Great Communicator was in Kentucky, when Clinton harkened back, as she often does with certain crowds, to the good old days of her husband’s administration. But this time she suggested, carelessly, that she was going to put Bill “in charge of revitalizing the economy, because you know he knows how to do it.” Social media — and traditional media — went nuts; the Times ran a full story on it, suggesting that Clinton’s “passing promise” indicated that “Mr. Clinton would be put in charge of a significant part of a president’s portfolio.”

It was a (bad!) rhetorical error in which she gracelessly crossed the (bright!) line between invoking Bill’s name and naming him to a post. That she hadn’t intended it was made clear by the manner in which she practically rolled her eyes when saying “No” to a follow-up question about whether she’d appoint her husband to her Cabinet. But this is the price Clinton pays for not having a warmer, closer relationship with reporters: She does not get the benefit of any doubt; there is no elasticity of comprehension. She does not enjoy the goodwill that someone like Joe Biden — a king of misstatements, prone to offending entire nationalities — has earned, which permits him to get out of media-jail time and again.

First: If a man intimated on the campaign trail that he was going to put his wife in charge of anything — if Ted Cruz said he was gonna let Heidi negotiate with Iran — it would be laughed out of the room, even if Heidi spoke fluent Farsi and had spent her grad school years studying nuclear deterrence. Ha ha, have THE WIFE do it! These are the same douchemooks who think it’s funny to ask male colleagues if they have to “check with the boss” before they commit to an after-work Hooters run.

But when a woman does it, she’s deadly serious because how can A CHICK possibly do math-y things like run the economy, and completely outrageously wrong because you can’t just have your husband do things for you. Dumb bitch. If you had real experience like being in charge of Miss Universe, you would know things like that!

Second: You will not get a campaign-trail reporter, editor or producer to admit that there is any kind of decision-making as far as who gets a pass and who does not. They’re all helpless in the face of what’s “out there” and nobody makes coverage decisions at all. It’s like some magical, completely neutral machine programmed by angelic virgins in heaven decided what gets spun up into the Outrage of the Week and what gets given a pass.

Yet they do make decisions. Big ones, and little ones, every single day. And those decisions add up to Hillary being wooden and uninteresting and yet completely gaffe-prone, and Joe Biden being America’s stoner roommate who is hilarious and doesn’t mean any of it. I love Dirty Uncle Joe like my own left breast but if Hillary or even Elizabeth Warren said half the shit he does they would be calling bingo in Schenectady.

those brave men stopt the war, and made me live, in a free country!!!!
thank them and there familie.
anita
in the netherlands

I’ve written before about the way this election seems to be all about abstractions, as if things of this magnitude were a thousand years ago, and all we can care about now are trivialities: someone’s demeanor, someone else’s tone, what somebody wore, what somebody ate. As if we have no choice but to fight about a celebrity’s baby or a dead gorilla, and yell at each other about parenting trends.

And then something like this comes back.

I did a story once, offline now naturally, about a man searching for his family’s history in the war, and about the people in Holland trying to help him. They talked about digging up bits of shrapnel in the fields, from this war and the one before that. Century-old metal rising to the surface. This wasn’t an abstraction. The things we do matter.

Now, with Mr. Trump having clinched the Republican nomination, down-ballot candidates are finding the task of distancing themselves from their presidential nominee much easier said than done. On what seems to be an hourly basis, Mr. Trump churns out politically incorrect invective that has the dual effect of firing up his supporters and offending women, Latinos, Muslims and, as Mr. Trump has called them in the past, “the blacks.”

So Republicans in moderate states will be forced, over the next five months, to show that they are not the same as their party’s presidential nominee, while at the same time latching on to the anti-Washington sentiment that Mr. Trump has built his political success on. They may be incumbents, their argument goes, but they are the real outsiders in their races. They’re outsiders that use their place in Congress to get things done within the parameters of power. You know, an outsider’s type of insider.

This is the dance that happens every year, the “insider” who pretends to Fight The Man, and very few people ever say hey, buddy, if you’re so anti-Man why are you scarfing The Man’s cocktail weenies all year long? It’s a cliché, that Republicans are running for the chance to govern on an anti-government ticket, but until fairly recently only filthy hippies actually called them on it.

Maybe the only nice thing about Trump’s candidacy is that he’s exposing the frauds in the party he now leads. He makes all kinds of sense shit-talking his own kind, pointing out that he’s bought and sold them all ten times over, laughing at them as they squirm. That exposure, natch, is not worth even one of the people who’ll be deported if Trump becomes president, so holding these senators’ and congressmen’s feet to the fire on the topic of their nominee is essential if we don’t want the country to go the way of the GOP.

There’s nothing like a national holiday to make one feel ritualistic.This post was written in 2010 and is making its seventh annual appearance here at First Draft. It was also published in our anthology, Our Fate Is Your Fate:

The veteran I’d like to remember on this solemn holiday is the late Sgt. Eddie Couvillion.

My family tree is far too tangled and gnarly to describe here but suffice it to say that Eddie was my second father. He served in Europe during World War II, not in combat but in the Army Quartermaster Corps. In short, he was a supply Sergeant, one of those guys who won the war by keeping the troops fed, clothed and shod. Eddie was what was called in those days a scrounger; not unlike Milo Minderbinder in Catch-22 or James Garner’s character in The Great Escape.

Eddie’s favorite military exploit was running an army approved bordello in France after hostilities ended. He always called it a cat house and bragged that it was the best little whorehouse in Europe. One can serve one’s country in manifold ways…

Eddie died 5 years ago and I still miss him. He was a remarkable man because he changed so much as he aged. When I met him, he was a hardcore Texas/Louisiana conservative with old South racial views and attitudes. At an age when many people close their minds, Eddie opened his and stopped thinking of black folks as a collective entity that he didn’t care for and started thinking of them as individuals. Eddie was a genuine Southern gentleman so he’d never done or said an unkind thing to anyone but confided to me that the only one he’d ever hurt by being prejudiced was himself. I was briefly speechless because we’d had more than a few rows over that very subject. Then he laughed, shook his head and said: “Aren’t you going to tell me how proud you are of me? You goddamn liberals are hard to satisfy.”

Actually, I’m easily satisfied. In 2004, Eddie had some astonishing news for me: he’d not only turned against the Iraq War but planned to vote for John Kerry because “Bush Junior is a lying weasel and a draft dodger.” That time he didn’t need to ask me if I was proud of him, it was written all over my face. It was the first and only time he ever voted for a Democrat for President.

I salute you, Sgt. Couvillion. I only wish that I could pour you a glass of bourbon on the rocks and we could raise our glasses in a Memorial Day toast.

States that levy a “millionaires tax” risk chasing those millionaires away to Florida, Texas, and other places with no income tax. Hedge fund manager David Tepper’s recent decision to move from New Jersey to Florida, possibly creating a billionaire-size hole in Jersey’s budget, raised alarms. Golf great Phil Mickelson, shortly after his infamous Dean Foods stock trade, complained about his high tax rate in California and threatened to move to Florida.

Now, a study based on 13 years of tax data finds that most millionaires don’t move cross-country just to avoid a tax bill. It turns out that the rich, while perhaps different from us, aren’t all that mobile. When they do move, it’s often for reasons that have nothing to do with taxes. For one thing, they appear to like the beach.

Shocking to me that super-rich people will whine and throw a tantrum and then do nothing real about it.

Not everyone at Mr. Sanders’s rallies is dreading a Trump victory, however.

Victor Vizcarra, 48, of Los Angeles, said he would much prefer Mr. Trump to Mrs. Clinton. Though he said he disagreed with some of Mr. Trump’s policies, he added that he had watched “The Apprentice” and expected that a Trump presidency would be more exciting than a “boring” Clinton administration.

“A dark side of me wants to see what happens if Trump is in,” said Mr. Vizcarra, who works in information technology. “There is going to be some kind of change, and even if it’s like a Nazi-type change, people are so drama-filled. They want to see stuff like that happen. It’s like reality TV. You don’t want to just see everybody be happy with each other. You want to see someone fighting somebody.”

Jackie Becerra, 28, an executive assistant who lives in Lake Forest, also said she was leaning toward voting for Mr. Trump if Mr. Sanders was not the Democratic nominee. She said that she doubted Mr. Trump would keep his promise to build a wall along the border with Mexico, and that, even though his proposal to bar foreign Muslims from entering the United States made her “nervous,” she did not believe he could stop people from coming into the country based on their religion.

“Everyone is like: ‘Trump has these terrible social issues. He hates Muslims and he hates the L.G.B.T. community,’ ” she said. “But our world is big enough that he’s not actually going to implement any of those changes in a realistic way. But what he will do is potentially audit the federal government, and he will try to break up some of the banks and try to at least influence government that way. However, with Hillary, it will just be a complacent, run-of-the-middle-of-the-road presidency.”

I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS FOR THESE PEOPLE FOR STARTERS would you be willing to say, “I would like to see women denied necessary health care so that I can be amused?” Like, with a straight face, would you say that to a woman carrying a dying baby? Donald Trump, in addition to being hella funny on the campaign trail, thinks she ought to be punished somehow for her nonviable pregnancy, so she’s your target audience for this question.

Would you tell an immigrant family or a Muslim family, “I’m willing to take the chance that you might be deported or denied legal entry into the United States, so that I won’t be bored at all in the next eight years?” Would you tell it to their kids? I can translate it into Arabic, if you like. If that would make it easier.

Would you tell a father who’s getting food stamps because the minimum wage won’t buy both milk and diapers, “Yeah, I know it’s nice to have reasonable assurances that your baby is gonna eat today but I just want to see what color Trump would paint the Roosevelt Room.” After which of his two jobs do you think it would be best to approach him with your views?

These are tough questions. Take a minute. Here’s some paper and a No. Fucking 2 pencil in case you need to show your work.

And I know, okay, #notallSandersvoters. This isn’t about the callow youth or even the callow rich. I’ve heard much of the same from middle-class people who say they are “independent” because they don’t really have politics beyond what they’ve picked up from the Today show and they can’t defend a single argument. I’ve heard this from lots of Republicans: Yeah, Trump’s a moral monster whose every third utterance makes me want to drink turpentine but at least it won’t be DULL, DUDE.

Ha ha ha, so funny.

The reason this has been the worst election, the most stressful election, the most infuriating election I can remember isn’t that the Republican nominee is a garbage disaster. It’s not that he’s supported by white supremacists or that he stirs up religious bigotry or that his followers assault protesters and the homeless. It’s not even that he’s opened up America’s racist septic tank and let us all take a nice, deep whiff.

The reason this election has been such a reeking, rotten clusterfuck is that far too many of the people who are supposed to be taking this shit seriously are apparently unable to conceive of any reason to even HAVE a presidential election except to give them something to watch.

They’re unable to imagine, for example, their FOOD or their SHELTER depending on the outcome of a presidential election. They’re unable to conceive that their health care might be vetted by some crucifix-humping jackass who doesn’t even know how pregnancy works.

So they shit on protesters and they disregard everyone on the internet yelling LISTEN UP DIPSHITS and they act like the only consequence to the country from a Trump presidency would be the EMBARRASSMENT they would suffer. Like we can get to how you’re telling everybody in St. Tropez that you’re bummed to be American once we finish worrying about how people might actually starve.

So if you’re one of these people, who’s been saying all over the Internets that hey, at least Trump’s inauguration will be like a TOTAL TITTY FEST, try to imagine saying that to somebody whose life is at stake. Because somebody’s is. Lots of somebodies.

I had semi-big plans for this week’s post, which have been foiled by my rotten summer cold. Yeah, I know, technically it’s late spring, but the iron fist of summer has my city by the neck. It’s summertime in New Orleans, y’all.

Having made my excuses for the brevity of this installment, I *do* have a theme song. Maybe I’m Amazed was the stand-out track on Macca’s first solo album, McCartney. It’s a loose, unpolished, homemade collection of tunes, which is charming if a bit rough around the edges. We begin with Macca’s original version on which he played all the instruments, followed by the Faces rocking it live.

The only thing I’m amazed about right now is that I’m sitting upright. Summer colds are the worst. So it goes.

That’s it for this week. I featured a peppery potboiler by Erich von Stroheim on Thursday. He was one of the leading directors of the silent era until his profligate spending ended that part of his career. He was also known as a hiss-provoking villain during both World Wars. He was the Hun, the man you love to hate. On screen, Stroheim was infinitely worse than any mere bat-villain. That’s why I memed the bastard:

I waited all day for this and I got it: The Cavs defeated the Raptors in Game Six tonight, pushing them into the NBA Finals for the second-consecutive year. Last year, they lost the finals in six to a ridiculously overpowering Golden State Warriors team, the core of which came back this year to set an NBA record with 73 regular season wins.

As much credit as I want to give the Warriors for last year, I can’t see them as the perfect champs other people do. Kevin Love went down in the Boston series and Kyrie Irving went out in the first game of the finals. Matthew Dellavedova and Iman Shumpert played heavy minutes, while Timofey Mozgov was playing on one good leg. Still, the Cavs were still up 2-1 and within a whisker of a 3-0 start. However, it was another year without a championship for the Mistake by the Lake.

1964 and counting.

Tonight, the Cavs were up about 18 with 4 minutes to go and my dad kept pressing me, “Look, it’s over. Switch to the Brewers game.” I couldn’t. If you spent your whole life loving the teams of Cleveland, you know it’s never over until it’s over and even then you expect to get screwed.

What I have learned about loving Cleveland sports teams is that you never, ever get a break. You can make it to the precipice, but you never make it over. You’re basically Moses: You get a peek at the promised land, but you die before you can enter it.

It’s hard to say what’s worse, though: The years of “almost, but not quite” or the decades of futility in between.

The new Browns.

The Shawn Kemp/Mike Fratello era of 80-point games.

The Indians of my youth.

It’s like they keep you frustrated to the point of abdication, only to rise from the ashes, fly toward the sun and then watch the wings melt off. The crash is so painful. Always.

And yet, we endure.

I was born 10 years after the last Cleveland championship. My hometown teams (Bucks and Brewers) never won a title in my lifetime. My only respite has been the Packers, but everyone here claims them as their own.

Once. Just once. Please God. Give me a championship where I can call it mine.

Let MY team win. Let MY team have the moment that lives on the other side of heartbreak.

As Joan Hodges once said, “I prayed (during the last game of the 1955 world series), ‘Please, the Yankees have won it so many times. It means nothing to them. Please, just this once…'”

And yet, I’m a Cleveland fan. I know “next time” is our home and our vestige. I have visions of LeBron blowing out a knee in Game 1 or some ridiculous play costing us a Game 7. Living the life I have with the teams I love, I expect the next horrible nicknamed play that will break my heart again.

I’ll be holding my breath tomorrow, hoping that the OKC Thunder will dethrone the champs, thus giving Cleveland the home-court advantage for the finals and eliminating a scary-good team. And then June 2, my hopeful prayers will begin again.

I have a hellacious cold today so thoughtful analysis is beyond me. I am, however, almost as obsessed with the Insult Comedian’s weird hairdo as he is. The folks at Gawker have done the definitive investigation into the Donald’s hair and have discovered that it’s an elaborate weave. If he didn’t spend all his time lying about his hair, he could use this as selling point with African-American women; many of whom have weaves up the wazoo.

Presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump has generated an unceasing torrent of press attention that some estimate to be worth roughly $2 billion. Yet the central mystery at the very core of his persona—his inscrutable hairdo—has somehow, impossibly, remained unsolved. Until, perhaps, now.

A tipster who claimed knowledge of Trump’s hair recently came to Gawker with a potential solution to the enigma: Trump’s hair is not his own, costs tens of thousands of dollars for installation and upkeep, and comes from a man as mysterious as Trump is bombastic.

This solution that Trump, our tipster says, sought for his hair woes is a little-known, patented hair restoration treatment called a “microcylinder intervention.” It’s only performed by one clinic that we know of—Ivari International—where our source once sought treatment, and where he says he learned of Trump’s apparent patronage. What’s more, Ivari’s New York location was inside Trump Tower—on the private floor reserved for Donald Trump’s own office.

This may sound trivial but hair is important. I suspect that Trump identifies with Samson as portrayed by Victor Mature in the campy Cecil B. DeMille flick. If his cotton candy piss hair is exposed as bogus, perhaps his powers will wane; at least I hope so.

It’s only a matter of time before the Insult Comedian sues Gawker over the, uh, hair piece about his hair piece. I wonder if he can enlist Silicon Valley shitbag Peter Thiel to finance any litigation. Thiel is not only a Trump delegate but a *real* billionaire as opposed to Trump whose claims of wealth are as phony as the weave on his head.

That’s all from me today. I’m so woozy that I cannot even make a proper Thiel pun. I have a Thieling that I’m going to close with a number from a certain Broadway musical:

Guess I could pull out the games I pirated onto floppy disks, look for an old Mac Quadra 605…and a boom box cassette deck (I was kind of late to adopt CDs — used to joke I thought they were a passing fad…didn’t realize…that was no joke)…because The Donald wants to relive if not re-litigate the 1990s. Or maybe like a cruder, orange-er version of Richards Viguerie and Scaife, he just wants to throw as much mud as his stubby-fingered- hands-can-clench-onto at the closest wall and see what sticks.

Get out you Alanis CDs and find yourself some Seinfeld re-runs because we’re gonna do the 90s Time Warp.

I am a bad film buff. I had no idea that actor/director Erich von Stroheim had written a book named Paprika in a futile attempt to direct again. I do, however, know how to spell his first name unlike the folks who published this peppery potboiler.

Remember the picture taken at a Trump rally earlier this year in Mobile, Alabama? You know, the one with the wild-eyed strawberry blond cheerleader type thrusting her baby at the Insult Comedian. Here’s its scariest iteration thus far:

To see the silly/terrifying GIF, click on play. The crazed Trumpette looks a bit like white trash by choice Kathryn on Bravo’s Southern Charm. You can tell I have a cold: I just admitted to watching a show that makes the Real Housewives franchise look like Shakespeare.

I have to somehow cleanse myself after mentioning the trashiest thing I watch. How about a Mobile pun:

Appearing on Imus in the Morning Tuesday, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman told host Don Imus that he believes that Islamic State wants Donald Trump to win the presidency.

“The bad guys know just what they’re doing,” Friedman said. “They wanted [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] because that would radicalize the situation even more. And I fear that ISIS will believe that Trump would radicalize the situation even more.”

I don’t actually think it’s okay to speculate about who ISIS wants to be president. Because first of all, ISIS wants to be president, itself, and second, if ISIS is not happy with our present Seekrit Muslim Kenyan I doubt they will be happy with a racist ear of corn like Trump.

Third, it’s just dumb and gross and lazy. It was dumb and gross and lazy when people were yelling that Bin Laden and Kerry had secret handshakes and it was dumb and gross and lazy when people were yelling that McCain and al Qaeda had secret handshakes and the only proper response to the idea that terrorists favor one candidate over another is WHO THE FUCK CARES WHAT THEY WANT THEY ARE NOT THE BOSSES OF US.

We can argue all day long whose policies would benefit terrorists who prey on the weak and the poor, but quite honestly more people are dying here every day of preventable diseases and poverty and violence so when we are done with which presidential candidate the American terrorists are excited about, we can then rule out the candidate overseas terrorists want, too.

Imagine this was Generic Candidate X. He goes out on the campaign trail and calls his opponent’s husband a rapist. Meanwhile, X’s ex-wife has accused him of raping her in sworn divorce testimony.

What would be written about X? About his opponent’s husband? What would the stories be?

As I started to talk about Sunday and never really got into because I was once again overwhelmed with disgust for the bros of all stripes who are dominating this election (a boiled bunny in every pot!), there is this tendency to shrug off shit that should be a national emergency because “it’s Trump, whaddya gonna do?” Or even, “it’s the Clintons, whaddya gonna do?”

We haven’t just normalized Trump. We’ve normalized not reporting on insane shit because the Clintons are frequent targets of it. Like if somebody throws one bucket of shit on you it’s NOT OKAY but if it’s ten buckets, well, you’re just always covered in shit, so you must just attract it somehow.

Therefore I propose that we institute a name change test. If you would report on … let’s say hypocritical, at best … accusations of rape from one candidate against the husband of another candidate, and do your damnedest to find out if ANY of that is legitimate, if those candidates were named Smith and Jones, then you can’t ignore it if they’re named Trump and Clinton.

Trump is not a joke candidate who thinks Elvis is talking to him through the toaster, whose theories you may safely ignore and about whose background you don’t really have to give a shit. He’s the presumptive nominee of one of two major parties for President of the United States. Change his name. What would the coverage be?

I typically approach historical bio-pics with trepidation. I *never* expect them to get every detail right but I’m a stickler for them getting the big picture right: HBO’s All The Way does just that. One reason I think the portrayal of LBJ, from the Kennedy assassination to his landslide win in 1964, is so accurate is that it’s based on Robert Schenkkan’s Tony award-winning play. It gave them time to work the kinks out.

The first thing I watched for was if Bryan Cranston who is 5’11” looked big enough to play LBJ. Johnson was 6’4″ a veritable giant in his time. LBJ was usually the biggest person in the room and his size was a key component of his domination politics. In an earlier HBO movie, The Path to War, Michael Gambon played LBJ but looked petite every time he stood next to Alec Baldwin as Robert McNamara. Cranston’s height didn’t matter on the stage but it was a nit I was prepared to pick. I think they pulled it off with camera angles and casting some short dudes in key parts. That nit remains unpicked but alluding to it gives me the excuse to talk about Peter Piper picking pickled peppers. I have no idea why but y’all know how my mind works by now. Let’s get down to the nitty gritty but first a vaguely relevant musical selection:

Back to the Johnsonian nitty gritty. The best thing about All The Way is how it captures LBJ’s complex and nuanced relationships with Richard Russell and Hubert Humphrey. Frank Langella plays Russell as a charming, lonely man with *horrible* retrograde, racist views on civil rights. LBJ was a professional son and Russell was his Senatorial daddy but this period addressed the son’s final rebellion against a father devoted to the lost cause. Langella is always excellent, but this may be his best performance yet. He plays Russell as a figure of pathos and a man out of time. Btw, Russell was always a skeptic about his protegé’s Vietnam misadventure. It’s pity he wasn’t listened to, just as he should have listened to Lyndon about civil rights. So it goes.

Johnson’s relationship with his Senate colleague and later Vice President Hubert Humphrey is often mischaracterized. Humphrey was *not* a fawning sycophant with his head wedged up LBJ’s ass. He was usually the dominant figure in any room *except* when he was around Johnson who out alphaed even other alpha males. Bradley Whitford nails HHH as a man who respects Johnson’s talents and leadership skills even while keeping a respectful distance from LBJ’s less salubrious aspects. The power dynamic between the two men shifted dramatically when Humphrey became Vice President. He should have stayed in the Senate but that’s neither here nor there. All The Way captures the nuances and subtleties of the LBJ-HHH relationship in a way I didn’t think possible.

All The Way also does a good job of capturing both sides of Johnson’s nature: he could be a harsh, malicious asshole one minute and a loving generous man the next. When he was riding high, nobody was more kindly and charming. When he was on the skids, nobody was nastier. Some of the assholery was done for effect, to bend people to his formidable will. Unfortunately, it was those closest to him such as Lady Bird and Chief of Staff Walter Jenkins who bore the brunt of his genuniely ugly side.

I swore I wouldn’t nit pick but I have a few minor cavils about All The Way. First, it *is* true that Johnson and Humphrey deployed UAW President Walter Reuther to lean on Dr. King about the Mississippi mishigas. But Reuther didn’t travel with sinister looking bodyguards like some mobbed-up union big cigar. In fact, Reuther fought mob infiltration of the labor movement, which is one reason the UAW left the AFL-CIO. Again, a minor point as is one about Hubert Humphrey. HHH did NOT attend Johnson’s memorable speech in New Orleans during the 1964 campaign. They kept Humphrey out of the South since he was Senator Civil Rights. End of the nit-picking portion of the post.

Bryan Cranston captures Lyndon Johnson in all his complexity. It’s hard to be simultaneously arrogant and insecure, but Cranston nails the duality of Johnson’s nature. He was a bundle of contradictions and remains the hardest President for me to rate. On domestic issues, he’s one of the top 3 or 4 Oval Ones, but Vietnam and his mendacity about it are always there. Lyndon Johnson was a complicated motherfucker, y’all. So it goes.

The acting is uniformly excellent. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Melissa Leo as Lady Bird and my homey Anthony Mackie as Dr. King. I give All The Way 4 stars, an Adrastos grade of A- and an Ebertian thumbs up.